Links

Dedication

TO THEREV. SAMUEL WILLIAM WAYTE, B.D.PRESIDENT OF TRINITY COLLEGE, OXFORD

MYDEAR PRESIDENT,
{v} NOT from any special interest which I anticipate you
will take in this Volume, or any sympathy you will feel
in its argument, or intrinsic fitness of any kind in my
associating you and your Fellows with it,—

But, because I have nothing besides it to offer you,
in token of my sense of the gracious compliment which you
and they have paid me in making me once more a Member of
a College dear to me from Undergraduate memories;—

Also, because of the happy coincidence, that whereas
its first publication was contemporaneous with my leaving
Oxford, its second becomes, by virtue of your act,
contemporaneous with a recovery of my position there:— {vi}

Therefore it is that, without your leave or your
responsibility, I take the bold step of placing your name
in the first pages of what, at my age, I must consider
the last print or reprint on which I shall ever be
engaged.

Preface
to the 1878 Edition

{vii} THE following pages were not in the first instance
written to prove the divinity of the Catholic Religion,
though ultimately they furnish a positive argument in its
behalf, but to explain certain difficulties in its
history, felt before now by the author himself, and
commonly insisted on by Protestants in controversy, as
serving to blunt the force of its primâ facie and
general claims on our recognition.

However beautiful and promising that Religion is in
theory, its history, we are told, is its best refutation;
the inconsistencies, found age after age in its teaching,
being as patent as the simultaneous contrarieties of
religious opinion manifest in the High, Low, and Broad
branches of the Church of England.

In reply to this specious objection, it is maintained
in this Essay that, granting that some large variations
of teaching in its long course of 1800 years exist,
nevertheless, these, on examination, will be found to
arise from the nature of the case, and to proceed on a
law, and with a harmony and a definite drift, and with {viii} an
analogy to Scripture revelations, which, instead of
telling to their disadvantage, actually constitute an
argument in their favour, as witnessing to a
Superintending Providence and a great Design in the mode
and in the circumstances of their occurrence.

Perhaps his confidence in the truth and availableness
of this view has sometimes led the author to be careless
and over-liberal in his concessions to Protestants of
historical fact.

If this be so anywhere, he begs the reader in such
cases to understand him as speaking hypothetically, and
in the sense of an argumentum ad hominem and à
fortiari. Nor is such hypothetical reasoning out of
place in a publication which is addressed, not to
theologians, but to those who as yet are not even
Catholics, and who, as they read history, would scoff at
any defence of Catholic doctrine which did not go the
length of covering admissions in matters of fact as broad
as those which are here ventured on.

In this new Edition of the Essay various important
alterations have been made in the arrangement of its
separate parts, and some, not indeed in its matter, but
in its text.

Advertisement
to the First Edition

OCULI MEI DEFECERUNT IN SALUTARE TUUM

{ix} IT is now above eleven years since the writer of the
following pages, in one of the early Numbers of the
Tracts for the Times, expressed himself thus:—

"Considering the high gifts, and the strong
claims of the Church of Rome and her dependencies on our
admiration, reverence, love, and gratitude, how could we
withstand her, as we do; how could we refrain from being
melted into tenderness, and rushing into communion with
her, but for the words of Truth, which bid us prefer
Itself to the whole world? 'He that loveth father or
mother more than Me, is not worthy of Me.' How could we
learn to be severe, and execute judgment, but for the
warning of Moses against even a divinely-gifted teacher
who should preach new gods, and the anathema of St. Paul
even against Angels and Apostles who should bring in a
new doctrine?"[Records of the Church, xxiv. p. 7.]

He little thought, when he so wrote, that the time
would ever come when he should feel the obstacle, which
he spoke of as lying in the way of communion with the
Church of Rome, to be destitute of solid foundation.

The following work is directed towards its removal.

Having, in former publications, called attention to
the {x} supposed difficulty, he considers himself bound to
avow his present belief that it is imaginary.

He has neither the ability to put out of hand a
finished composition, nor the wish to make a powerful and
moving representation, on the great subject of which he
treats. His aim will be answered, if he succeeds in
suggesting thoughts, which in God's good time may quietly
bear fruit, in the minds of those to whom that subject is
new; and which may carry forward inquirers, who have
already put themselves on the course.

If at times his tone appears positive or peremptory,
he hopes this will be imputed to the scientific character
of the Work, which requires a distinct statement of
principles, and of the arguments which recommend them.

He hopes too he shall be excused for his frequent
quotations from himself; which are necessary in order to
show how he stands at present in relation to various of
his former Publications. * *
*

LITTLEMORE,
October 6, 1845

POSTSCRIPT

Since the above was written, the Author has joined the
Catholic Church. It was his intention and wish to have
carried his Volume through the Press before deciding {xi} finally on this step. But when he had got some way in the
printing, he recognized in himself a conviction of the
truth of the conclusion to which the discussion leads, so
clear as to supersede further deliberation. Shortly
afterwards circumstances gave him the opportunity of
acting upon it, and he felt that he had no warrant for
refusing to do so.

His first act on his conversion was to offer his Work
for revision to the proper authorities; but the offer was
declined on the ground that it was written and partly
printed before he was a Catholic, and that it would come
before the reader in a more persuasive form, if he read
it as the author wrote it.

It is scarcely necessary to add that he now submits
every part of the book to the judgment of the Church,
with whose doctrine, on the subjects of which he treats,
he wishes all his thoughts to be coincident.